Speed and quality are two factors that make software development stand out in today’s business world. Development teams push limits to succeed within the constraints of timely completion of deliverables, budget, resources, and management expectations.
However, even with such efforts many projects fail. According to a survey, around 66% of software development projects fail. The reasons vary from setting unrealistic goals to communication gaps, unrealistic budgets, improper planning, and poor project management.
Therefore, achieving successful outcomes from a software development project seems challenging, but you can certainly deliver a high-quality project despite unfavorable odds. By implementing the right project management techniques, you can assure completion on time and within budget by ensuring as many risk factors as possible are mitigated during the software development phases.
Besides, businesses can take assistance from third-party software development project management tools to ensure success. We have tools like Azure DevOps, Jira, Monday, and Trello that are focused on project management best practices when it comes to software development. On top of these, we have third-party solution providers and integrations like GitHub and various devops tools, that allow optimized service delivery of software projects.
To help you in staying on track, you can learn about project management practices that can help you complete software projects successfully. Some of these include:
1. Enhanced Communication and Collaboration:
Usually, the biggest hurdle to project success is hidden in the form of a communication gap. If developers are unaware of the product requirements, they would end up rendering efforts in the wrong direction. Additionally, redundant efforts can cost businesses money and time. For this purpose, the team should be aware of their roles, responsibilities, and the scope of work.
Bottlenecks, task challenges, scope transitions, and project phases; all should be documented to make better-informed decisions and learn from past mistakes. This becomes easier when regular check-ins and meetings are scheduled to keep a team on the same page.
However, even with regular meetings and proper documentation, software projects fail because teams are unable to work with cohesion. This is where reducing barriers and encouraging collaboration between all stakeholders allows software teams to work toward a common goal and ensure success.
2. Reporting Accurately:
Properly identifying, aligning, and monitoring project tasks can ensure that your project will be completed without any failures. When businesses ignore the on-ground realities and constraints, they set unrealistic go-live dates. Adopting a data-centric approach to measuring KPIs and continuous monitoring of milestones are the solutions to avoid project failure when speaking in terms of poor reporting.
3. Planning is Everything:
Begin the development project with realistic and SMART goals. By realistic, we mean, discussing every aspect of requirements and developing expectations after the inception phase. This will support developers in remaining on track with functionalities throughout the project development process.
On the other hand, don’t underestimate the external influences that may cause a delay in your deliverables. External factors, more often than not, result in unavoidable delays and result in not being able to manage completion expectations.
4. Requirement Change Handling:
Change is inevitable even in software development. It’s what invented the ideology of Agile project management; software development is hard to predict. Sometimes project stakeholders change requirements, making it all the more important for the project scope and milestones to have the capacity of changing accordingly.
However, it is impractical to blindly add every change. Priorities should be catered to only according to budget and time. For this reason, effective management of requirement changes is necessary for a software development project.
5. Support & Knowledge Transfer for Critical Business Applications:
Taking chances with critical business applications (such as the project management tool you’re using) is a possible threat that can sometimes lead to failure as your day-to-day development operations are dependent on these. It is vital to provide support and knowledge transfer for critical business applications and failure to do so may result in your software project falling apart.
This is why, it is recommended to monitor system availability and ensure the systems are upgraded and free from any troubleshooting problems. Transferring knowledge of how the applications function aids in avoiding a pipeline failure.
6. Developing Risk Management Strategies:
When problems occur during software development, having a response team that quickly analyzes and resolves the issue is crucial. To avoid risk with a proactive approach, risk management strategies should be developed. Subsequently, identify potential risk factors, prioritize them, and develop a response strategy. Also, keep in mind that risk factors can never be eliminated but you can mitigate them with effective planning.
In brief, effective planning, better communication, constant monitoring, obtaining feedback, checking systems, developing risk mitigation plans, and managing changes in requirements can assist you in achieving successful project outcomes. Therefore, applying all these tips to your project management methodology will improve the success chances of a software project.
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